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Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
Gerard Van der Leun
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I dont understand the reference to “Copybook Headings”
Anonymous would be me; I’m not ashamed of my ignorance of Victorian era arcana
Schoolchildren used to practice writing by copying sentences in a copybook. Usually, in Kipling’s day, the sentences were well-known proverbs, Psalms, or the like. There’s an example of a copybook page at 0:22 in the above video.
“No! I’m not asking you. As a priest of Christ I am commanding you by the authority of Almighty God not to lay hands on your child, not to offer her life in sacrifice to a false god of expedient mercy. I do not advise you, I adjure and command you in the name of Christ the King. Is that clear?”
Thank you so much, Julie. It would be the equivalent of Catechism class for Catholic kids. And a whole lot of Catholics would be fitting subjects for poem/essay.
They “outgrew” their Catholic grounding, in the same way some Brits outgrew the wisdom found in their copybooks. .And what was the result …
I get it now, I really do.
C. S. Lewis wrote about modern, wretched British education in one of his Narnia books, from the 1950s. My own public school education was the squalid remnants in the barrel of modern education. Over the last decade, for me, it has been a pleasure reading manly, Christian poetry.
I suspect it’s time for Recessional to be updated as well for the present day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WBra_BjJQY
One good memorable verse deserves another.
https://youtu.be/cOGHCzuinBw
ErisGuy. A Canticle for Leibowitz. One of the greatest novels ever written both for substance and style.